Off-highway machines are in widespread use in construction, mining, forestry, and other similar industries. Such machines can be used to transport material, such as, for example, ore, overburden, rock, sand, dirt, or gravel, from one location to another. In a typical work cycle at a worksite, the machine receives material in its dump body at one location, hauls the material in the dump body along a haul road to a second location at the worksite, and then dumps the material at the second location.
The conditions in which these machines are used can be severe. The worksite's haul roads may have ruts, potholes, large rocks, or other obstacles or hazards scattered about their paths. Workers at a worksite may regularly maintain the haul roads at a worksite to mitigate such road obstacles or hazards once they are identified. However, many of the obstacles are dependent on the particular conditions of the worksite, including its location and the local weather conditions, for example, and may arise without advance warning and in unpredictable locations. As such, completely eliminating such obstacles and hazards at a worksite is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish.
Because these machines typically haul very heavy loads, when a machine travelling along a haul road encounters an obstacle (such as a bump or pothole, e.g.), the frame of the machine can be subjected to twisting and other structurally-damaging forces that can cause the structural components of the machine to fail prematurely. As hauling conditions of a worksite become more and more severe, the expected life of the structural components of the machine decreases. It would be very helpful for worksite management to be informed when a machine is being used at the worksite such that its expected life is being reduced.
Knowledge of potentially damaging worksite conditions would be useful to not only worksite managers, but also machine operators. For example, the driver could decrease the speed of the machine before it reaches a particular spot of the haul road which has been identified as having a road hazard, such as a bump or pothole, for example.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,454 is entitled, “Method for Monitoring a Work Vehicle Suspension” and is directed to a system and method monitoring the struts of a machine's suspension system. The struts contribute to the proper operation of the vehicle such that a single collapsed strut can have serious manifestations in structural damage, tire wear, and payload monitor accuracy. These consequences can be mitigated by an accurate and reliable strut monitor. According to the '454 patent, pressure type sensors are disposed on each of the struts and their pressure is monitored during three critical phases of operation. These phases include static, loading, and roading modes and each mode requires a distinct method for detecting a collapsing strut. The presence of a collapsing strut, detected by any of the three methods, is communicated to the vehicle operator whereby operation can be immediately suspended. Although the strut monitoring system of the '454 patent is effective in monitoring for strut failure, there is a continued need in the art to provide additional solutions to enhance the ability to monitor hauling conditions at a worksite to help reduce the occurrence of machine damage caused by poor hauling conditions at the worksite and to help identify locations along haul routes of the worksite that can be improved.
It will be appreciated that this background description has been created by the inventors to aid the reader, and is not to be taken as an indication that any of the indicated problems were themselves appreciated in the art. While the described principles can, in some aspects and embodiments, alleviate the problems inherent in other systems, it will be appreciated that the scope of the protected innovation is defined by the attached claims, and not by the ability of any disclosed feature to solve any specific problem noted herein.